Waking Up to Darkness
by Toramo
Summary: In which it is Steve who wakes up in the 21st century with no memories and it is Bucky who instead has to remind him of the past and of the man he used to be.


When Steve wakes up he only knows one thing, that is something was very wrong. He fought, broke out of the room and sprinted out of the door and down the hall. What he saw he knew could not be. His head ached and the landscaped around him blurred, images mixing together. Like two photo negatives overlapping, squinting at the image the through sun. It was wrong.

They tell him he is a hero, that he is a miracle. They show him the reels and the photos of a man like him but not. A man who is brave and selfless, a leader, one that people would follow and die for; he sees a man he does not recognize. When they hand him the shield, with the star that should mean something, he takes it. But not to help others, not to defend a country he can't remember being born in, no, he is selfish; he takes it because it is offered. An anchor where he is lost, cut loose, he takes it to save his own sanity. Steve knows that he is not Captain Rogers, the captain was brave, forgiving, and kind, and he is none of those. He is just Steve, and Steve is not Captain America. He is no hero.

He visits the exhibit at the Smithsonian more times than he can count. Stands and stares at the photos, watches the videos, but the person he sees is not himself. It is strange, surreal, he sees himself smile, a smile that is bright and hopeful; he doesn't recognize it. He walks through the pathways, inconspicuous, just another nameless patron, curious, trying to learn the truth about a legend.

When he is not training or tracing scars trying to remember the pain they once caused, he reads. There are hundreds of books about him. About his childhood, his time in the army, the serum, his fall. He reads them greedily, consuming them, trying to fill the hollow hunger in his gut. Films, documentaries, audio interviews, he scans them all. Looking for pieces of himself which were left scattered at the bottom of the sea.

Sometimes he remembers.

The smell of baking bread, a woman's laugh, and his head pillowed on the firm, flat chest of another. Callused hands, cologne, cheap rum, bitter rain water, blood. Tastes, smells, touches, fragments of a glorious life. Sometimes he is angry, jealous of the man named Steve Rogers. He who everyone loves, everyone remembers, everyone wants, instead of him. He is the shadow that he is constantly standing in, the person who he is not. So he reads, trying to learn how to be Steve, even if it is only a shade. It is all he has.

It is after when he realizes just how worthless that effort was.

He fights the Winter Solider. His movements are memories written into the fibers of his muscles, guiding him, moving him. He is wearing his uniform, dark blue, sleek and simple. They had wanted to add a star but he had vetoed it. That was no longer him. He fought the Solider with his bare hands; he had left his shield back in his apartment, even after months he still wasn't used to carrying it around all the time.

The Solider was fast, strong, and the fight was bloody. They grappled and wrestled, beyond the use of weapons or technique, instead they rolled on the ground like animals. The Solider claws at his face and Steve pulls away, feeling his mask tear under the metal grip of his enemy. He expects those hands to gouge his eyes next, to tear his skin, but there is nothing. The Solider had stopped fighting.

Steve half sits, propped by elbows and stares. The other man is still, legs wrapped around his hips, silently staring, his torn mask in one hand, the other, made of flesh and bone, shakes slightly. Vibrant blue eyes stare out, vivid against the black war paint around his eyes. They look as if they were on the verge of tears.

"Steve?" he words come from an unseen place, only the shifting of the fabric covering the Soldier's mouth indicating it was him who had spoken. Steve felt a black anger rise in him, another one, another person who knew him that he did not, another one looking at him but only seeing _him._

"How the hell do you know my name?" Steve knows that it is better to play it safe, reinforcements were coming and he was unarmed. The Winter Soldier still had the advantage, pinning him down, that cybernetic arm less than a foot from his throat. Steve knew that he could kill him easily, even if the other was still looking shell shocked.

The other man's throat bobbed beneath the black fabric of his uniform before his human hand, the one not still gripping his mask, reached up. Not to strike or strangle Steve but to pull his own mask off. Steve was shocked; every file they had given him about the Winter Solider had told him that the man was a ghost. Faceless, nameless, and as heartlessly cold as the winter for which he was named. But here he was, exposing himself in from of Steve, laying himself open to a man he didn't even know.

The mask was worked off in short, sift movements and Steve saw the face that no one outside of Hydra had seen and lived to tell about it for nearly seventy years. It did not look like the face of a killer. Eyes soft and raw, lips trembling, skin shallow and expression drawn, painful as an open wound. It looked like the face of a victim.

"It's me, Bucky." The voice was rough, soft and slightly husky, as if he had spent too much time screaming, or crying. Steve felt himself grow hot, irrational anger bubbled up, this man, his enemy, wasn't talking to him, he was speaking to Rogers and he expected him to answer him. That expression wasn't for him; that open, trusting, _loving _look wasn't meant for him. He felt that jealous anger rise again, burning away his sense.

"Who the hell is Bucky?" He regretted it as soon as the words were out of his mouth. His own petty selfishness, the need to hurt someone who loved the past Steve, was not worth the look he got from the other man. It wasn't disappointment, or anger, or contempt, it was just plain pain, sorrow so deep it etched itself into each line of that face. It was not worth the taste of bitter tears on his tongue.

The other man spoke no more, didn't even protest when Natasha appeared with thirty other agents and two choppers. He didn't fight, didn't resist, even as he was cuffed and led away. His silence screamed in Steve's ears louder than any cry ever could, that barely suppressed suffering making Steve hate what he was even more.

It was Natasha who finally identified him. Bucky was a ghost, a man from Steve's past, a man who he only knew as James Barnes, who's face he couldn't eve recognize under a few days' worth of stubble. It had been almost three hours when Natasha found him at the exhibit, standing and staring at the same black and white photo of a man who everyone said was his best friend. She didn't say anything, just went up and stood next to him, silently watching over but not looking, until it was dark and the ushers showed them the way out and the museum closed. He was grateful.

He saw James again a few days later; they told him that he had been asking for Steve. The man in the SHEILD holding cell looked nothing like the man that was displayed behind velvet ropes, eyes too cold, body still and face so empty it was as if he had never smiled a day in his life. But Steve had no place to judge, he had trouble placing his own face in those wartime propaganda reels, smiling among showgirls and fireworks.

Steve sat down in the chair they had place on the other side of the bullet proof glass; he didn't know why they bothered. They had disabled the Winter Soldier's arm when he was brought in. He wasn't any stronger than Steve now, even less so starved and sleep deprived. They didn't speak for a long time, James staring at Steve and Steve staring at anywhere but James. The first to break the silence was Steve, speaking more for the sake of SHEILD than himself.

"What do you remember?" It echoed hollowly in the enclosed space, bouncing off the bland white walls, ringing in his ears. James didn't look at him when he answered.

"Not much. They tell me that they mostly wiped me between missions. But there are some things. Colours, sounds, mostly. But, for some reason, I remember one thing." His eyes finally darted up from here they had been studying the hem of his SHEILD issued clothes.

"You," For a moment Steve didn't know whether he meant that all he remembered was Steve or if he was asking what Steve still remembered from the past. He figured that is was both. His eyes dropped to the floor before he answered.

"Nothing, nothing at all." The words hung heavy in the silence until a SHEILD agent opened the door to tell them their time was up. When Steve looked up when he stood, James was looking away, staring at the wall at nothing. Steve pretended he didn't notice the wetness on his cheeks.

He wasn't asked for again.

It was nearly two months later before he heard about James again. He had been through every evaluation, test and examination that SHEILD had thrown at him and been approved by a variable army of psychiatrists before they had let him out for observation. Steve had offered him a place to stay when he had heard; it seemed like the right thing to do.

Steve lived in one of the newer neighbourhoods, down by the water front where the yuppies and artists lived. It was full of artisanal coffee shops and trendy galleries, but he barely bothered going out, he wasn't really into the whole creative scene.

When James had appeared on his doorstep with only a duffle bag full of generic shirts and pants, a black hooded windbreaker with the hood drawn up even in the July heat, he had let him in with only a tense smile and gesture of his hand. After about fifteen minutes of tense silence Steve once again tried to break the ice.

"James-" but the sound of the mug's handle cracking in James's steel grip silenced him. Guessed they deemed him stable enough to reactivate it, the only difference being the blank space of steel where the red star used to be.

"Don't call me that," the other man looked up sharply at him, he looked different now that he was clean shaven and his hair cut short in an old fashion style. Younger, less hardened, handsome.

"My name is Bucky." Steve relented.

"Bucky." The name felt foreign yet familiar, like many things it felt wrong somehow. But the smile he got in return was worth it. That smile, stolen from the old Steve, was worth it.

They lived in that easy understanding for months to come. Steve learned that Bucky, not James, liked his coffee with two sugars, right after he woke up. When he needed the caffeine to wake up as he dragged himself out of bed, his hair mussed yet soft to the touch, sleepy and pliant. He learned that Bucky preferred strawberries to blueberries, and that he never wore shoes around the house. That when Steve had found out that he had never seen Finding Nemo, he made him watch it and all the other Pixar movies with him, sitting together on the same cramped couch in Steve's living room, shoulders barely touching.

He learned that Bucky only showered with soap and that scent that he carried with him, that was infused into the sheets in his bed, his towels and clothes was something purely his own. Steve learned that the blue of his eyes was closer to periwinkle than sky, with just a tiny hint of violet in the iris. That he was just naturally pale instead of just not getting enough sun. That not all his scars were from his time as the Winter Soldier or the war.

He traced a faint line over Bucky's left side, just over the thin skin that covered his ribs, shifting like a silver serpent over the ridges and valleys of his ribs every time he inhaled as he told him about how he got it. Beating up bullies that were giving Steve a hard time in some alley back in Brooklyn and being pushed into a pile of broken bottles. How Steve had patched him up with his mother's first aid kit, tying the bandage tight while knelling between his legs.

In those silent moments between night and day Steve would ask about the past, who he was, what he was like, half fearful and half hopeful at what he was going to hear. What Bucky did not tell him he learned on his own, mapping out each inch of skin beneath his fingertips, counting each scar and kissing it better, memorizing each line of Bucky's body and committing each sound, each gasp or whimper to memory, as not to ever forget.

Sometimes after, in those silent moments Steve speaks about his own fears. That he may never remember his past, that he will disappoint everybody, that he'll disappoint Bucky. He would sometimes keep rambling until Bucky had to lean over and silence him with his own lips. Smothering his doubts and quieting his fears until it was morning.

They moved before the end of fall. Out of the industrial loft they lived in before into an old brown stone in Brooklyn. Bucky got Steve a sketchbook for his Christmas and he filled it in a day, full of drawings of the skyline, the snow and Bucky. Steve got him an old record player with a collection of vinyls, all of Bucky favorites and they danced to the oldies until sunrise on Christmas morning.

And as the clock counted down on New Year's, they stood with each other on the balcony of their house, looking into the distant bustle of the island as the snow fell silently around them, the door open and the TV plating the background. Bucky head laid on Steve's shoulder and arm around his waist, Steve with his cheek resting on the crown of his head, hand curled around Bucky's shoulders, playing with the fingers of Bucky's left arm their breaths puffing in the air but they were warm.

And when the sound of cheers came from inside signalling a new year they turned to each other, both looking at a face that they both recognized but was also new in so many ways, they leaned in for a kiss. Arms wrapped around Bucky, Steve felt no more anger, no more jealousy and no emptiness, only simple joy, and when they pulled back it was Bucky who spoke first. Eyes soft and loving, looking at only Steve he whispered against Steve's lips like it was a secret from the rest of the world.

"I'm with you," it was almost like a question and Steve knew the answer, smiling he leaned in again, lips brushing together as he whispered back his answer, his promise.

"Till the end of the line." And nothing had ever felt so right.

* * *

I had originally planned for this story to have an unhappy ending with Steve never regaining his memories and Bucky unable to except this new Steve. The ending lines would have been the same, but with Bucky crying at yelling at Steve and saying something along the lines of "You said you would be there with me until the end of the line! Why don't you remember that, why don't you remember me." But I'm glad that I choose to end it on a hopeful note, god knows this fandom already has enough angst. I just wanted my boys to have the happy ending they didn't in the movie. But oh well, maybe in Captain America 3 ;)


End file.
